


Interlude at a Way Station

by radondoran



Category: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night - Snoopy (fictional novel)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 09:16:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radondoran/pseuds/radondoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Kansas, a boy and his sister watch a departing train.  Takes place between Part I and Part II.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude at a Way Station

**Author's Note:**

  * For [temvald](https://archiveofourown.org/users/temvald/gifts).



At a small railway station in Kansas, a boy and his sister watched the trains. Every week more people were leaving for the big city. No one ever came to stay.

But then, that wasn't true: someone had come to stay. The boy scarcely remembered, and the sister did not so much remember as remember the story of, the dark and stormy night when the mysterious courier had delivered to the bewildered stationmaster an antique pistol, a large bag of foreign doubloons and a small girl, before alighting again upon the departing train and vanishing without a trace.

The girl was too small to have had a say in the matter, but she had, in fact, arrived at the station, and stayed. She made one more in the census of the little town. On market days she watched the trains with the boy and his sister.

Now the train in the station was the one on which the girl had booked her passage. So perhaps there truly had been no arrival. The girl, too, was only passing through.

She waved gaily at her friends on the platform, pulling her new shawl tight around her in the wind. In her hand luggage were the antique pistol and the last of the foreign doubloons, a coin which she could not spend but would not sell.

Goodbye, she called.

Goodbye, returned the boy from Kansas. I’ll miss you.

If the girl with the shawl had stayed a year longer, she probably would have been his wife. The idea had never been spoken between them, not in words, but for some time the possibility had lingered in the background with a sense of comfortable inevitability. But the boy from Kansas could not follow her to the city. His duty was to take care of the small farm, besieged by unscrupulous ranchers. He was resolved to his purpose. He watched the girl with the shawl about to depart, and he smiled.

Goodbye, the girl with the shawl called out.

Goodbye, said the sister of the boy from Kansas.

She, too, was haunted by ideas unspoken. The way she would look too long at the girl in the shawl, and the smiling surprise with which she looked back. Those clasps of the hand between friends that were almost unbearably tender. The sister of the boy from Kansas had not dared put a name to this; there was no point. She had no hope of being husband to the girl with the shawl, and she could not console herself by a duty to defend the small farm with labor and fists. The girl with the shawl would leave, and the sister of the boy from Kansas would stay, and she did not smile.

They heard the conductor shout All aboard. The whistle blew. The train sputtered to a start. As the wheels began their accelerando, the girl with the shawl blew kisses and waved hugely.

You don’t have to go, the sister of the boy from Kansas wanted to shout.

But she did. For so long the girl with the shawl had dreamed of striking out to find her answers. The sister of the boy from Kansas did not blame her. There was a grand story, a story of pistol-shots and pirates and kings, and the girl with the shawl was part of that story. She must find it. She must pursue her quest for answers about her mysterious past.

The sister of the boy from Kansas was not part of any story. She held no answers. There was nothing about her which could ever be mysterious.

Goodbye, repeated the sister of the boy from Kansas.

The girl with the shawl was carried out of sight across the plains.


End file.
